Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- So, the PSOE prime minister has failed again to get support for his investiture, and the 'far left' Podemos has increased the chances of a right wing government after a possible/probable general election in November. The 4th in 4 years. IGIMSTS.
- Unemployment in Spain continues to fall but is still high, at 14%. Or 14.02%, to be ludicrously precise.
- The Daily Telegraph has an article this week - see here, if you can get past the paywall - on Galicia. The headline and opening paragraphs:-
Galicia is one of those places where people live very well indeed but don’t really feel the need to shout about it – which might explain why, despite being a popular holiday destination for Spaniards, relatively few Britons make it there.
The last bit is nonsense, of course, but the basic thrust is accurate. Sadly.
1. My advice to comrade Boris: never, ever try to bluff the EU: Ambrose Evans Pritchard.
Boris Johnson first entered my consciousness at an excruciating dinner just before the EU’s Maastricht summit in late 1991. It was a revealing little episode in the march of Anglo-European history. He had come over from Brussels after causing weeks of grief for Downing Street with a volleys of journalistic dynamite. I was writing leaders on Europe at Telegraph HQ.
We were to meet the embattled Prime Minister John Major for peace talks at Brooks’s, the 18th Century Whig club on Pall Mall, and the haunt of then Telegraph editor Max Hastings. The fifth man at the diner à cinq was Charles Moore. Mr Major - as he then was - aimed to persuade us that he was not going to sign away the pound and lock Britain into a European proto-state. But his pitch was shockingly off colour. He swore profusely in a faux tirade of nationalism, cursing the amiable German Chancellor as “that bastard”. The Prime Minister would never yield to Johnny Foreigner. He banged the table so hard that the glasses almost crashed to the floor. As we left Boris shook his head in astonishment. “That was a disgraceful spectacle,” he said.
John Major did resist Europe weeks later at Maastricht, “game, set and match” in his tennis parlance. What he did not understand - but a younger Jean-Claude Juncker grasped at once - is that by keeping Britain out of the great federalising project of monetary union he set the long fuse on Brexit.
Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK’s first Brexit negotiator, told Parliament this month that Maastricht necessarily created an unstable equilibrium. A non-euro outsider would be in constant tension with an enterprise subject to monetary union's integration logic. This could not endure.
Sir Ivan told colleagues as early as 2006 that British withdrawal was coming. The rupture could have happened over the Lisbon Treaty - midwife of a European supreme court - or again over the Fiscal Compact. It does not really matter what finally precipitated Brexit. A bust-up was in the Aristotelean nature of things.
I later took over Boris’s old job in Brussels. He asked me to write occasional snapshots from EU ground zero for the Spectator. At no time during those years did I ever detect any deviation from his core view that the EU was amassing unhealthy powers. He liked to joke that one day units of EU-badged border troops would be deployed to "help" smaller EU states that strayed from the righteous course. As indeed they surely will. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia know how such forces work. He shared my view entirely that the EU was creating an upper layer of executive government beyond accountability, with a Caesaropapist structure at odds with British democratic self-rule.
Eight years as Mayor of London may have softened this but it came as no surprise to me when he embraced Brexit after months of soul-searching and agony, well aware that polls deemed it a forlorn political cause. Nor did it shock me that he drew up two versions - for and against - to thrash out the arguments before he jumped. I did much the same myself. The salon view that Boris latched onto Brexit out of pure opportunism is glib to the point of absurdity.
So my advice to Boris after so many years in the trenches together is: never, ever try to bluff the EU. Your own bluff will be called with interest. That way lies abject capitulation and the pitiful fate of Syriza in Greece. Alex Tsipras tried to have his cake and eat it. He gained power on a campaign to tear up the EU-IMF Troika "memorandum" and end austerity, while also telling the Greek people that they could keep the euro. The European Central Bank slowly reeled him in. It cut off liquidity - critics say illegally - to private Greek banks that had done nothing wrong. When the cash machines were down to €40 and financial collapse was days away he bottled it. He could not bring himself to back the parallel currency of Yanis Varoufakis and ejection from the euro. Tsipras crawled back to Brussels and swallowed terms even harsher than the original Troika diktat.
The EU does not have the same hold over British banks but it has other ways to ratchet up the pressure. The lesson of the last decade is that the EU's soft empire institutions have become very powerful and are no longer all that soft, usually deploying the ECB as enforcer.
Frankfurt gave secret orders to an elected Italian government to carry out sensitive labour and fiscal reforms in 2011, and then forced it from office via a rollover crisis in the bond markets. There was no whisper of protest from the EU’s missionary press corps or Euro-MPs over this unconstitutional abuse. But that is the point. Nothing restrains the machine.
A regime can of course be both powerful and brittle. Such was the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Hands of steel, feet of clay. Monetary union remains fundamentally dysfunctional. The German-Italian gap has not closed. The currency bloc already has one foot in a Japanese deflation trap.
Interest rates are minus 0.4% even before the next global downturn starts in earnest. Fiscal policy is paralysed by the apparatus of institutionalised Hooverism. It is a ghastly financial accident waiting to happen. Or as euro-founder Otmar Issing says wearily: “One day the whole house of cards will come tumbling down”.
You might say that the EU should think twice before risking a no-deal Brexit that could crystalise such a denouement. But it would be an error for Boris to weigh that too heavily in his calculus. Euro politicians were not alert to their own vulnerability in 2008 and they are not alert now.
Should Boris persist in threatening no-deal after entering Downing Street, he must mean it. He must be willing to embark on a radical strategic shift, shelving all thought of an EU accord while the country switches focus to a fast-track trade deal instead with the US. From this there would be no coming back. Such a course might be a positive shock of Schumpeterian creative destruction for the British economy - indeed, I think it would be - but the destruction would come first.
It is possible that the EU elites would offer Brexit concessions worth the name if faced with concrete evidence of this fateful pivot, and if they concluded that their most lucrative market (a £95bn surplus) and their biggest defence player was going to absorbed into the American orbit permanently. That would be to ‘lose’ the UK a second time. But they will not be swayed by “do or die” bluster, or talk of withholding the £39bn alimony fee, or tabloid threats.
If Boris has no stomach for such a storm, he should tack the other way and play the "Nixon in China" card. He should present himself to Berlin and Paris as the authentic Brexiteer who can deliver the ERG hold-outs where Theresa May failed, so long as the EU gives him a surgical change to the Irish backstop. He should then smile and play for time until the Europe's internal contradictions come back to the fore.
What he must not do is to oscillate between defiance and submission, pleasing no-one in the hapless manner of Mrs May. Pick one or the other, comrade. 2. How social media has coarsened our minds: James Marriott
2. A book about the perils of TV written 34 years ago is scarily prescient of the age we live in
Few writers are prophetic. An American media studies professor called Neil Postman was. In 1985 he published Amusing Ourselves to Death, a polemic that warned society was becoming trivialised by its addiction to electronic media. Postman died in 2003 and never lived to see how prescient his book would become.
Try this: “When a population becomes distracted by media, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversations become a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then the nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a clear possibility . . . ”
Postman’s principal target was television but I reckon those words are more relevant now in the age of Twitter and YouTube.
His great insight was that the way we entertain ourselves matters. Entertainment shapes society, it shapes our public debates, it shapes how we think. When our media changes, society changes. The first Book of Kings, the product of a largely oral culture, praises Solomon for having memorised 3,000 proverbs. After the discovery of writing our conception of intelligence changed — memory mattered a lot less. Nobody nowadays would say of an acquaintance, “He’s a really smart guy, memorised an absolute tonne of proverbs.” (This counts as progress.)
Postman thought television was a “cultural revolution” to match the advent of the alphabet. The same can be said of social media.
Until recently, our culture was shaped by books. The 19th-century French historian Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that when Americans got into political rows they argued “in dissertation” — that is they made lengthy and curiously impersonal speeches at each other. In a culture dominated by print, people spoke like books (it’s part of the reason why characters in Victorian novels speak in long, complex paragraphs that seem unrealistic to us). In the 19th century, an opinion, however erroneous, was likely to look like something you might find in a book: reasoned and supported by evidence.
Postman argued that television favoured glibness and appearance over intellectual substance, changing the very nature of opinions. “It is probably more accurate to call [those opinions] emotions rather than opinions,” he wrote. That rings even truer today than it did in 1985. An opinion formed on the basis of reading an outraged tweet is qualitatively different from one formed on the basis of a long newspaper article or a book: you’ve formed an emotion not an opinion.
We’re familiar with the idea that apps such as Facebook and Twitter have been engineered to trigger our emotions. Twitter’s 280 character limit is designed to prevent coherent thought. Social media engineers know that the more outraged we are, the longer we’ll spend on their products.
Postman was acute in spotting the influence of TV on other media. Political debates began to favour appearance over substance and he spotted that some newspapers were beginning to ape the style of TV. That gravitational power now belongs to social media. A leaked “content grid” handed out to employees of the London Evening Standard advised reporters to write about “incidents that will anger/terrify/or shock the audience”.
The influence of social media is everywhere in public life. The style of the Twitter “clapback” — responding to criticism with a vicious put-down that delights your supporters but does nothing to persuade your enemies is ubiquitous. It’s been perfected by everyone from Donald Trump to the Democratic senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The modern urge to “cancel” sinning celebrities, banishing them from public life, is connected to the prevalence of the “block” function on social media apps. We’re used to the idea that if we don’t like someone we can simply remove them from our minds. As electronic media triumphs, traditional media such as books and newspapers are embattled. Figures published this year show that sales of novels are in steep decline. We’ve swapped a form of entertainment which by its very nature fosters empathy and deep thought, inserting us deep into other consciousnesses, for one that has been designed to make us hate each other.
Anyone railing against modern technology risks sounding fogeyish but this is undeniably depressing. Again, Postman was prescient. He framed his argument with reference to two dystopias: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he thought was wrong, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which he found prescient:
“What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”
Postman offered the hope that people would evolve to become more sophisticated and sceptical consumers of modern media. For all Postman’s thundering, TV never destroyed society. The “culture death” he feared never arrived. But are we smart enough to outwit Mark Zuckerberg? Our situation still looks perilous.
- Anyway, It's the fiesta season in Pontevedra, which this week centres on the 27th annual Jazz and Blues festival. We have brochures for all the summer events and, separately, for this week's music festival. These used to be in both Spanish and Galician but now they're only in the latter. Perhaps reflecting the fact that the Galician Nationalist Block (BNG) runs the Town Hall. Interestingly, in my barrio of Poio, across the river, the equivalent brochure is still in both official languages. It's also noteworthy that all the brochures are rather less glossy than in earlier years. La Crisis finally seems to have caught up with them.
- Richard North - an ardent but knowledgable and realistic Brexiteer - takes aim at Boris Johnson and his pro-Brexit cabinet here, pulling no punches.
- Europe can’t stop laughing at Boris Johnson, it says here. Which might be a tad short-sighted if he's not really just the clown he often affects to be.
- Meanwhile . . .
- The German economy is in free fall, claims Ambrose Evans Pritchard.
- Said AEP gives advice to BJ on how to deal with the EU. See the first Article below.
- Social media has coarsened our minds in ways that were predicted long ago, says James Marriott in the second article below.
- In the Age of Trump, we are living on a planet of the surreal, says 75 year old Tom Engelhardt
- The reason might be that, as claimed by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the world is run by ignoramuses, wackos and psychotics. Probably a reasonable view if you live in the USA. See here on this.
- Spanish prefixes and how they work.
- A UK TV ad today reminded me of this 80s hit. And compelled me to seek further examples of the group's talents, here (start at minute 2.47) and here. Nice.
1. My advice to comrade Boris: never, ever try to bluff the EU: Ambrose Evans Pritchard.
Boris Johnson first entered my consciousness at an excruciating dinner just before the EU’s Maastricht summit in late 1991. It was a revealing little episode in the march of Anglo-European history. He had come over from Brussels after causing weeks of grief for Downing Street with a volleys of journalistic dynamite. I was writing leaders on Europe at Telegraph HQ.
We were to meet the embattled Prime Minister John Major for peace talks at Brooks’s, the 18th Century Whig club on Pall Mall, and the haunt of then Telegraph editor Max Hastings. The fifth man at the diner à cinq was Charles Moore. Mr Major - as he then was - aimed to persuade us that he was not going to sign away the pound and lock Britain into a European proto-state. But his pitch was shockingly off colour. He swore profusely in a faux tirade of nationalism, cursing the amiable German Chancellor as “that bastard”. The Prime Minister would never yield to Johnny Foreigner. He banged the table so hard that the glasses almost crashed to the floor. As we left Boris shook his head in astonishment. “That was a disgraceful spectacle,” he said.
John Major did resist Europe weeks later at Maastricht, “game, set and match” in his tennis parlance. What he did not understand - but a younger Jean-Claude Juncker grasped at once - is that by keeping Britain out of the great federalising project of monetary union he set the long fuse on Brexit.
Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK’s first Brexit negotiator, told Parliament this month that Maastricht necessarily created an unstable equilibrium. A non-euro outsider would be in constant tension with an enterprise subject to monetary union's integration logic. This could not endure.
Sir Ivan told colleagues as early as 2006 that British withdrawal was coming. The rupture could have happened over the Lisbon Treaty - midwife of a European supreme court - or again over the Fiscal Compact. It does not really matter what finally precipitated Brexit. A bust-up was in the Aristotelean nature of things.
I later took over Boris’s old job in Brussels. He asked me to write occasional snapshots from EU ground zero for the Spectator. At no time during those years did I ever detect any deviation from his core view that the EU was amassing unhealthy powers. He liked to joke that one day units of EU-badged border troops would be deployed to "help" smaller EU states that strayed from the righteous course. As indeed they surely will. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia know how such forces work. He shared my view entirely that the EU was creating an upper layer of executive government beyond accountability, with a Caesaropapist structure at odds with British democratic self-rule.
Eight years as Mayor of London may have softened this but it came as no surprise to me when he embraced Brexit after months of soul-searching and agony, well aware that polls deemed it a forlorn political cause. Nor did it shock me that he drew up two versions - for and against - to thrash out the arguments before he jumped. I did much the same myself. The salon view that Boris latched onto Brexit out of pure opportunism is glib to the point of absurdity.
So my advice to Boris after so many years in the trenches together is: never, ever try to bluff the EU. Your own bluff will be called with interest. That way lies abject capitulation and the pitiful fate of Syriza in Greece. Alex Tsipras tried to have his cake and eat it. He gained power on a campaign to tear up the EU-IMF Troika "memorandum" and end austerity, while also telling the Greek people that they could keep the euro. The European Central Bank slowly reeled him in. It cut off liquidity - critics say illegally - to private Greek banks that had done nothing wrong. When the cash machines were down to €40 and financial collapse was days away he bottled it. He could not bring himself to back the parallel currency of Yanis Varoufakis and ejection from the euro. Tsipras crawled back to Brussels and swallowed terms even harsher than the original Troika diktat.
The EU does not have the same hold over British banks but it has other ways to ratchet up the pressure. The lesson of the last decade is that the EU's soft empire institutions have become very powerful and are no longer all that soft, usually deploying the ECB as enforcer.
Frankfurt gave secret orders to an elected Italian government to carry out sensitive labour and fiscal reforms in 2011, and then forced it from office via a rollover crisis in the bond markets. There was no whisper of protest from the EU’s missionary press corps or Euro-MPs over this unconstitutional abuse. But that is the point. Nothing restrains the machine.
A regime can of course be both powerful and brittle. Such was the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Hands of steel, feet of clay. Monetary union remains fundamentally dysfunctional. The German-Italian gap has not closed. The currency bloc already has one foot in a Japanese deflation trap.
Interest rates are minus 0.4% even before the next global downturn starts in earnest. Fiscal policy is paralysed by the apparatus of institutionalised Hooverism. It is a ghastly financial accident waiting to happen. Or as euro-founder Otmar Issing says wearily: “One day the whole house of cards will come tumbling down”.
You might say that the EU should think twice before risking a no-deal Brexit that could crystalise such a denouement. But it would be an error for Boris to weigh that too heavily in his calculus. Euro politicians were not alert to their own vulnerability in 2008 and they are not alert now.
Should Boris persist in threatening no-deal after entering Downing Street, he must mean it. He must be willing to embark on a radical strategic shift, shelving all thought of an EU accord while the country switches focus to a fast-track trade deal instead with the US. From this there would be no coming back. Such a course might be a positive shock of Schumpeterian creative destruction for the British economy - indeed, I think it would be - but the destruction would come first.
It is possible that the EU elites would offer Brexit concessions worth the name if faced with concrete evidence of this fateful pivot, and if they concluded that their most lucrative market (a £95bn surplus) and their biggest defence player was going to absorbed into the American orbit permanently. That would be to ‘lose’ the UK a second time. But they will not be swayed by “do or die” bluster, or talk of withholding the £39bn alimony fee, or tabloid threats.
If Boris has no stomach for such a storm, he should tack the other way and play the "Nixon in China" card. He should present himself to Berlin and Paris as the authentic Brexiteer who can deliver the ERG hold-outs where Theresa May failed, so long as the EU gives him a surgical change to the Irish backstop. He should then smile and play for time until the Europe's internal contradictions come back to the fore.
What he must not do is to oscillate between defiance and submission, pleasing no-one in the hapless manner of Mrs May. Pick one or the other, comrade. 2. How social media has coarsened our minds: James Marriott
2. A book about the perils of TV written 34 years ago is scarily prescient of the age we live in
Few writers are prophetic. An American media studies professor called Neil Postman was. In 1985 he published Amusing Ourselves to Death, a polemic that warned society was becoming trivialised by its addiction to electronic media. Postman died in 2003 and never lived to see how prescient his book would become.
Try this: “When a population becomes distracted by media, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversations become a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then the nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a clear possibility . . . ”
Postman’s principal target was television but I reckon those words are more relevant now in the age of Twitter and YouTube.
His great insight was that the way we entertain ourselves matters. Entertainment shapes society, it shapes our public debates, it shapes how we think. When our media changes, society changes. The first Book of Kings, the product of a largely oral culture, praises Solomon for having memorised 3,000 proverbs. After the discovery of writing our conception of intelligence changed — memory mattered a lot less. Nobody nowadays would say of an acquaintance, “He’s a really smart guy, memorised an absolute tonne of proverbs.” (This counts as progress.)
Postman thought television was a “cultural revolution” to match the advent of the alphabet. The same can be said of social media.
Until recently, our culture was shaped by books. The 19th-century French historian Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that when Americans got into political rows they argued “in dissertation” — that is they made lengthy and curiously impersonal speeches at each other. In a culture dominated by print, people spoke like books (it’s part of the reason why characters in Victorian novels speak in long, complex paragraphs that seem unrealistic to us). In the 19th century, an opinion, however erroneous, was likely to look like something you might find in a book: reasoned and supported by evidence.
Postman argued that television favoured glibness and appearance over intellectual substance, changing the very nature of opinions. “It is probably more accurate to call [those opinions] emotions rather than opinions,” he wrote. That rings even truer today than it did in 1985. An opinion formed on the basis of reading an outraged tweet is qualitatively different from one formed on the basis of a long newspaper article or a book: you’ve formed an emotion not an opinion.
We’re familiar with the idea that apps such as Facebook and Twitter have been engineered to trigger our emotions. Twitter’s 280 character limit is designed to prevent coherent thought. Social media engineers know that the more outraged we are, the longer we’ll spend on their products.
Postman was acute in spotting the influence of TV on other media. Political debates began to favour appearance over substance and he spotted that some newspapers were beginning to ape the style of TV. That gravitational power now belongs to social media. A leaked “content grid” handed out to employees of the London Evening Standard advised reporters to write about “incidents that will anger/terrify/or shock the audience”.
The influence of social media is everywhere in public life. The style of the Twitter “clapback” — responding to criticism with a vicious put-down that delights your supporters but does nothing to persuade your enemies is ubiquitous. It’s been perfected by everyone from Donald Trump to the Democratic senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The modern urge to “cancel” sinning celebrities, banishing them from public life, is connected to the prevalence of the “block” function on social media apps. We’re used to the idea that if we don’t like someone we can simply remove them from our minds. As electronic media triumphs, traditional media such as books and newspapers are embattled. Figures published this year show that sales of novels are in steep decline. We’ve swapped a form of entertainment which by its very nature fosters empathy and deep thought, inserting us deep into other consciousnesses, for one that has been designed to make us hate each other.
Anyone railing against modern technology risks sounding fogeyish but this is undeniably depressing. Again, Postman was prescient. He framed his argument with reference to two dystopias: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he thought was wrong, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which he found prescient:
“What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”
Postman offered the hope that people would evolve to become more sophisticated and sceptical consumers of modern media. For all Postman’s thundering, TV never destroyed society. The “culture death” he feared never arrived. But are we smart enough to outwit Mark Zuckerberg? Our situation still looks perilous.
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